Designing Your Garden: Defining Structure

This can be the most challenging, yet the most fun part of developing your spatial design. Once you create a bubble diagram to organize your outdoor spaces, the next step is defining the structure of those spaces (this is officially called a form composition study). Will your garden be informal, formal, rectilinear or geometric? Look to the architecture of your house as inspiration or maybe you are drawn to a particular garden style. Structure can also evolve from a theme.

The image below shows how you can take a bubble (functional) diagram then transform them into garden structure studies. I encourage you to explore several options. Originally I only created the two garden structure studies for bubble diagram #2, then realized I needed to stretch myself, so created a couple more options for bubble diagram #1. My second set felt more dynamic.